Critical Essay by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker

SOURCE: “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” in New Perspectives on Melville, edited by Faith Pullin, Kent State University Press, 1978, pp. 162-96.

In the following essay, Higgins and Parker consider the various ways in which Pierre fails as a novel, at the same time proclaiming it the best psychological novel that had been written in English by the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

Pierre was not conceived as a lesser effort, a pot-boiler like Redburn, which Melville disparaged as something he wrote to buy tobacco with. Judging from his response to Hawthorne's praise of Moby-Dick in mid-November, 1851, Melville intended his next book to be as much grander than his last as the legendary Krakens are bigger than whales.1 Never a novelist or romancer within the ordinary definitions, Melville in Moby-Dick...